Two decades ago, I worked for a Fortune 50 technology company that applied spatial analysis to the challenge of bank branch placement. The results revealed that if drive time to a branch exceeded twenty minutes, a customer wouldn’t engage.

Today, twenty minutes isn’t just an inconvenient drive; it’s a lifetime in the banking industry.

Today, technologists in financial services find themselves in an ongoing dilemma. They solve unique problems that could never have been anticipated twenty years ago. They work to meet evolving customer demands, tackle employee technology issues, and manage the IT solutions that shore up both. Quite often, Citrix is part of the equation. With Citrix Workspace — a single cost-effective, easy to manage solution that includes XenDesktop, ShareFile, and NetScaler technologies — IT teams now can manage and maintain highly-competitive banking environments cost-effectively and securely. They also can work hard to out-pace a growing list of technology-centric customer and employee needs.

Motherhood, apple pie, and Citrix

Here’s a case in point from America’s Heartland — a banking institution in the Upper Midwest region of the United States wanted better visibility into its network and the ability to limit its physical footprint. The bank chose Citrix Workspace because it expands upon the bank’s existing XenDesktop environment.

NetScaler will provide branch networking, WAN and secure remote access. The market-leading Netscaler Web Application Firewall (Web Application Firewall (WAF) and load balancing also are key capabilities the bank needed that NetScaler delivers.

NetScaler Management and Analytics System (MAS) — a centralized network management, analytics, and orchestration solution — provides visibility to application performance and security for individual apps and groups of apps. It also enables the bank’s IT team to use pooled licensing to manage workloads flexibly across their infrastructure. In the future, visibility and control of the network will be significantly improved.

Additionally, with NetScaler, the network will be flattened and the team will continue on the path to a truly active-active datacenter model, a strategy many in the industry now advocate.

Four mobility management and file-sharing solutions will be replaced by the industry-leading file sync-and-sharing component of Citrix Workspace, ShareFile. Internal employees and external third parties will be able to easily and securely exchange files. Having ShareFile as the single solution also will alleviate confusion between platform ownership and technology integration. With ShareFile and NetScaler MAS, management will be simplified and consolidated. The team will not be overseeing a host of point solutions; instead, the entire environment will be comprised of integrated Citrix technology.

Going forward, Citrix will be the main end-user computing solution for internal and external access at this Midwest financial services institution. With that in mind, the bank’s technologists should be able to rest a bit more easily.

Are there any traditional values among banking customers anymore?

Speaking of end users, let’s take a moment to consult an Accenture Consulting study of the banking customer base. It highlights just how divergent the demands on IT and bank management can be.

The study delineates three different groups of banking customers. Nomads are computer-savvy customers who are open to providers that aren’t what we traditionally think of as banks. They also will give financial institutions their data – but they want something in return. Hunters care about cost, and according to the data, “expect price gains for sharing personal data.” Quality Seekers really want good service and they must be able to trust the institution with which they bank.

This disparity places huge demands on IT – from security and business continuity to mobility and IoT. Financial services IT professionals truly have their hands full. (Thank goodness those folks in the Midwest have Citrix!)

Got 20 minutes? Learn more about Citrix product and solutions: Citrix Workspace and NetScaler Management and Analytics System (MAS).

Learn more about Citrix digital banking solutions.

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